ABOUT KENT PHOTO ARCHIVE

THE KENTPHOTOARCHIVE WEBSITE is run and maintained by a small group of volunteers interested in restoring and preserving old photographs of Kent and making them available for the public to view.

It was originally created in 2004 as part of a lottery funded joint project between Maidstone Museum and Maidstone Camera Club. The project objective was to restore a collection of glass plate images found in the storerooms of the Museum and establish a database record together with high resolution digital scans of each image.

At the completion of the project the 'KentPhotoArchive' website was produced to fulfill the lottery fund requirement to make the images available for public viewing.
The fund was subequently wound up once the 'requirements' were completed.

Since then volunteers have continued to work with Maidstone Museum to record and digitise other archive photo collections in their possession and to add them to the website.

As the site has expanded it has attracted interest from other 'owners' of historic images of Kent and - as of January 2017 - Kentphotoarchive now includes images from numerous Kent Museums, Historical Societies and Private Collectors. The current total is over 21000 old images, of which around 7000 are accompanied by modern pictures taken at the same locations giving the viewer a 'then and now' comparison.

This website is just one of the ways that work done by KPA volunteers has given these old images a wider audience.Digitisation has enabled us to offer local illustrated talks and hold exhibitions of the images. Below are a poster of the 2012 exhibition at the Museum and a display of wartime images at the War & Peace Show.

Further interest and participation is generated through our two Facebook pages - 'Kent Photo Archive' and 'Finding Lost Kent'. The latter has enabled us to post, and have identified, many images of buildings and places which were previously unlocated by us.

All work is ongoing and many more images will be added on a regular basis. Other collections will also be added as and when they become available.